Delayed, but it’s done – this will be the final post of commentary on the research Mark Whalley and I conducted last year and had published in SSR In Depth this summer. It’s open-access so please do have a look and let me/us know what you think. We’re also presenting on the data in January at the ASE Annual Conference.
In the earlier posts of this sequence I discussed the context and the data we collected, as well as the recommendations I’ve built on what we found. Please note that Mark and I collaborated on the paper but these posts are my opinions, some of them going significantly further than the data supports in isolation.
Why we thought it was worth asking the questions about job satisfaction and retention
This post will be have a slightly different focus; I’m going to describe the challenges I had with data-collection, in the hopes it will help others avoid the traps I fell into, and think out loud about further research that might be fruitful and/or interesting. I am open to collaboration either as part of my day job or in my own time, so please do get in touch if this is something you’d like to discuss.
Data collection
Teachers are really bad at completing surveys.
Longer surveys get fewer responses.
The busier a teacher is, the less likely they are to complete a survey.
There aren’t many physics teachers in England in the first place.
Taken together, these facts mean that it’s hard to get enough responses to treat the results with confidence. The solution we came up with was an incentive, and after some discussions I secured the budget to provide a voucher to every person completing the survey. This obviously cost more than a prize draw, but avoided the complications of ensuring randomisation etc. To provide a choice, we gave the option of donating the money instead (to Education Support). So we set up the questions on one anonymous survey, linked the completion page to a separate one to gather contact info, and shared the link on social media.
Roughly an hour later we had over 200 responses, the vast majority of which were filled with random garbage and a procedurally generated email address in a transparent attempt to get the voucher. Because of my inbuilt cynicism – I mean, I have three kids and spent ten years in a classroom with other people’s teenagers – the voucher process was not automated. We identified the fraudulent attempts, started a fresh survey and tried again.
This time it took a couple of hours to be discovered, but we got about a thousand submissions. There was Latin in the free text boxes and random numbers in the data fields. A handful looked genuine but most were clearly bot-generated. A later version which was only emailed still got corrupted, suggesting the link had been shared online somewhere the spammers had access to it.
We considered asking participants to use a school-based email address for the voucher, but decided this would reduce people’s confidence in the anonymity. (Although I should emphasize the two surveys were separated by design so it was impossible to link the answers to the participant, even for me.) The platform we used, strangely, didn’t have a built-in Captcha option as a question you could include. We did look at whether we could use an external service for that to enable the voucher request, or a trap question, but it was too complicated.
In the end, there was only one solution – putting my pattern recognition up against the scammers. I ended up figuring out boundaries for several of the questions and having Excel grade the answers as green (possible) amber (dubious) or red (clearly a scam). For example, a participant who claimed to be at a school with 64 students but alongside 20 science teachers was unlikely to be genuine. Although it was frustrating, it was also really interesting when I got into the data, especially as several columns showed a smooth bell curve rather than the clusters we’d expect to see in the real world.
very short time taken for survey completion
inconsistent participant qualifications (no GCSEs, no A-levels, but doctorates in physics and engineering? really?)
unrealistic school numbers, student and staff
incompatible reported FTE vs timetable load
random or repeated phrases in the free text fields
In the end, I filtered around 5000 responses down to just under 100; those, with any possible identifying information such as time of completion removed, were shared with Mark for the data analysis.
My advice: when creating an online survey, set up at least some questions to allow impossible answers and plan on how to identify them quickly. Free text fields will be auto-filled by some bots and this can provide an obvious clue. Decide in advance what your yes/maybe/no ranges will be.
Next steps
I’m still looking at the dataset, for example to see whether there’s a correlation between responsibility roles and job satisfaction – in particular if colleagues are less grumpy about SLT if they’re already a middle leader. I think it would be really interesting to see whether any of the same issues show up for subject specialists who have to teach out of their exact specialism but within the same department. How to French teachers feel about a Spanish-heavy timetable, for example? I’d like to know how other factors, specifically age and gender, affect both job satisfaction and attrition factors. Recent work done looking at the exodus of women in their thirties from teaching suggests to me that alongside the recommendations in both the published paper and my commentary, you can make a big difference for those teachers by offering flexible working and matched timetables. We didn’t ask those questions because it counts as sensitive data and triggers a whole new world of GDPR and ethics trauma.
If I was doing this again, I’d simplify the questions and ask colleagues to prioritise the possible changes. If they could only have three or five changes from a shortlist, which would make the biggest difference? The benefit of this is that we could separate the possible changes based on the tiers I used in my last post, so HoDs find out which of the things they have control over are worth fighting for.
One of the things we looked at was deprivation score, and it didn’t make as much difference as we expected. (There were noticeably more physics specialists in less deprived areas though.) I’d really like to see the teaching unions investigate this angle to see if there’s a relationship between the deprivation index of a teacher’s home compared to their workplace. How does this vary by subject and seniority? For example, for some years I travelled from a relatively high deprivation area to teach physics in a leafy suburb. I’m prepared to bet that although it’s noisy, there’s a similar signal nationally.
I’d like to repeat my suggestion from the last post; we need a national programme of exit interviews for all departing physics teachers. Why do they go and where are they going? What might change their mind? Link it to an ongoing job satisfaction survey and we can see how much difference complaining about workload in years 2 and 3 makes to the chances of them leaving after year 5.
Give me some money and I’ll run a nationwide anonymous exit survey for every physics specialist leaving a state school. I’ll find out where they’re going and why. I’d hope schools are doing this now, but why on earth isn’t there a standardised set of questions for every departing teacher part of the Ofsted requirement for a school? Don’t add it to the league table, but anonymised to a regional level this would be a valuable tool. Add a threshold for X% of teachers ticking the same box for a particular school which should be a warning sign for SLT and Ofsted. (Heads Round Table, call me.)
Final thoughts
I really hope someone has been reading these posts – maybe there will be an influx as term restarts. Or maybe I should give up on blogging the old way and create a substack, but that just feels weird. If you’d like to discuss any of these ideas, please add a comment here, email me or find me on social media; I’m currently experimenting with BlueSky.
Previous posts have introduced the research that we did, summarised the negative and attrition factors the teachers considered most significant and linked this to what they reported might encourage retention. Understandably, we were most interested in the factors considered important by those who were seriously considering leaving! For at risk colleagues, what they said would help most were:
financial incentives
increased planning time
reduced marking load
teaching physics only
lesson resources
department resources
One identified challenge is that different factors are within the control of different stakeholders within the education sector; I suggested that thinking about this in terms of fuzzy boundaries is helpful, based on this:
Methods – all colleagues
All colleagues need to acknowledge the challenges, both generally and how it works in your local area/school/MAT. Teachers need to be enabled – which is more than simply encouraging them to do it! – to seek physics-specific support as well as more general teaching advice. I used to tell trainees that “there’s no such thing as a good teacher, just teachers who are good at X.” Find the local experts on specific areas of the curriculum, go to D&T to see how they deal with practical work and maths to see why kids struggle with your wording about ‘directly proportional’. Join the IOP’s professional community to get physics-specific resources.
Use those physics-specific resources for your own support and development, such as the free-to-access videos on IOP Spark. Wherever possible, invest your time in shared resources and transferrable approaches, like a question bank you can use and reuse every lesson, iterating rather than creating from scratch. Where a school has these in place already, use them. If you can’t find them, ask. Quite apart from anything else, the benefit of your students knowing the ‘house style’ means you’re able to lean on department and school procedures rather than establishing your own!
For colleagues working in the classroom, especially early in their career, it’s worth remembering how many different skills you’re trying to polish. One analogy is that it’s like trying to learn everything about driving a car simultaneously:
general maintenance
using the controls
hazard perception
highway code
adjusting for changing conditions
following directions
planning a journey
What actually happens – or at least it did back in the mists of time when I learned to drive – is that you consolidate one set of skills and move on to others. My parents got me sitting in the passenger seat, thinking about the conditions and other road users, before I got my provisional licence. I built on my experience of being a cyclist and all of those specific hazards. I practised using the controls, including a gear shift and a choke – I did say I was old – in an empty car park on a Sunday, so no other cars to think about. And so on.
A department scheme of work and borrowed resources are the equivalent of someone else doing the journey planning so you can focus on making progress, while not going over the speed limit. Shared planning means you can improve consistency of style and approach in a department – we call it a staff team for a reason. And if you’re wondering why you’re seeing new colleagues struggling, remember the curse of knowledge and lend a hand.
Tactics – Heads of Department, CPD and MAT Science Leads
As suggested in the final section of our paper, matched timetables should be the first priority at the department level; this will involve advocating upwards, possibly in writing with a link to our research. A colleague with year 7, 8 and 9 science classes has three courses to teach. Each course includes resources, practicals, risks to manage, misconceptions, assessments… and two-thirds of those will usually be in their non-specialist area. It is easy for their last experience of those ideas to be from ten years and two degrees ago. So instead, could they have three classes of the same year group? Three opportunities to teach the same content, with far less time needed to review/choose/write resources. It also means it’s worth them investing time in a more streamlined feedback and marking approach. When the tests come around, marking three sets of the same paper is easier than three different ones.
Wherever possible, give them more physics. Unless you’re over-supplied with physics specialists – statistically unlikely – then their colleagues will also be pleased. All of the hinterland we talk about, all of the extra confidence and increased familiarity, means less time spent planning. They can use that time to dig deeper into the pedagogy, to improve their understanding of the school approach to assessments – or simply have a cuppa in the prep room. Over time they’ll still get to teach more of the curriculum, but nobody would expect every French teacher to be as good at teaching Spanish simply because they’re in the MFL department.
Every Head of Department wants to support their colleagues with shared resources, feedback and marking approaches which balance the needs of the students with the sanity of the teachers. This is about making sure everyone knows the materials are there to promote a consistent house style and reduce duplicated effort. The danger here is that if you’re short of physics specialists, anything you ask them to create in-house means extra work for them, per-person. If you’ve got one specialist building things for everyone to use, being the point of contact for issues and troubleshooting, then congratulations – you’ve got a lead practitioner! Are they getting paid as such? If you work across a MAT then you’ve got the added challenge of providing support that’s helpful in terms of workload but still allows flexibility for different schools.
To make this easier, there’s a whole load of resources and projects that can support you at a department or MAT level to increase physics confidence and competence across the team.
the Stimulating Physics Network (SPN, now administered by STEM Learning) works with the department to boost physics skills
the Ogden Trust works with schools and individuals; the SKPT project in particular is a great way for individual colleagues to be upskilled, but availability may vary depending on area and they will need dedicated time.
the CPD videos on IOP Spark are topic-based support including real classroom approaches as well as physics explanations, and the ECPL set are a good way to structure mentoring conversations with those new to teaching physics. The Early Career Framework is time-consuming enough without having to write your own physics modules.
Remember that making sure there’s development opportunities provides many benefits; the point of including them here is that by reducing the overall workload in the team, you’re addressing an attrition factor. The downside of this is that it’s easy for biology and chemistry colleagues to feel that they’re missing out on refreshing and developing their own specialist areas.
I’m looking at ways HoDs could use a department audit, based on the questions used in our research, to identify local priorities and match them to specific, evidence-informed tactics. If you’re already monitoring this, please give me a shout!
Strategy – Headteachers and MAT leadership
My colleague and friend Mark is keen to use the model of ‘dealing with the closest crocodile.” Apart from what this reveals about the wildlife in Cheshire, it’s a great way to remind us that there’s almost always a crisis demanding the attention of education professionals at every level. Whether you use an Eisenhower matrix, GTD or some other way of prioritising, there will always be more problems than time or money for solutions. So why should the boss of a school with a hundred staff and two thousand students be spending time on physics teacher retention?
The title of this post is the reason why. Physics teachers are special, rare and hard to retain. But they’re not, despite the understandable hyperbole, actually unicorns. Instead, a good way to think about them is – to use a more recent biology concept – as an indicator species. Physics specialists have more options outside education, and those options are better paid on average (see Fig 5 in this from the NFER). The grass gets greener as they see their pay starting to plateau. Especially since the pandemic they’re contrasting their situation – in the workplace Monday to Friday, with associated time and money implications – with their fellow graduates working in PJs from home, with decent coffee and no commute. What this means is that they have more options, so they act when their non-physics teaching counterparts, under the same strains and stresses, can only grumble. This is particularly true for early career colleagues who don’t have a mortgage yet, and can make the most of the freedom that entails. They might be cheaper to hire, but the higher attrition rate might make up for that. If a school can’t retain physics teachers then it’s a warning sign that other colleagues would be leaving if they felt they could.
It may feel unfair to pay them more money, but if your Head of Science tells you that your sole physics specialist is doing all the jobs that are shared between three biologists, it’s easier to see how that’s unfair too. If you lost all your Spanish teachers, you would expect the Head of MFL to make choices about which languages were offered to your new Year 7 students. That can’t be done with Science, so show you respect their specialism by supporting matched timetables instead.
If you’re responsible for workload and retention across a MAT, you can use economies of scale to show how investing in resources pays off when it comes to staving off teacher exhaustion. Of course, these problems are not unique to physics teachers. It’s just that we notice the effect of the attrition factors for them first. If when you model the workload effects of new initiatives – and I’m assuming you do – some teachers are hit harder than others, what’s your plan to reduce that impact? How are resources like IsaacPhysics supported across the schools in the trust to reduce the barriers to uptake? When you choose new platforms for retrieval practice or worked examples, do your staff know that they’ll be available for long enough that it’s worth investing in them?
Alongside Ofsted surveys monitoring staff job satisfaction, wellbeing and concerns is going to pick up a lot of noise and occasionally an important signal. You can’t keep everyone happy all the time, but aiming to keep most colleagues grumbling a little rather than a few constantly crying in the staffroom is a more realistic aim. I’m not qualified to tell you how to manage your staff – I’m just flagging up why the physics specialists might be a more urgent concern than their numbers may suggest.
Policy and Law – government, exam boards and publishers
I’m grouping these together because the overlaps are so hard to entangle – and, frankly, I’d be amazed if any of them read what I’m typing. That’s a long way above my pay grade, but the reality is that if we don’t acknowledge who can make changes, we’ll get blamed for the ones we don’t make ourselves. Being a middle-manager and being blamed for the things your bosses do sucks, so drawing a line and admitting what’s beyond your control is important.
Defining the curriculum (government), how it’s assessed (exam boards) and how it’s taught (professional associations and publishers) are not small jobs. They’re also dependent on each other, which is why education reform is always challenging. Back when I was teaching – and over a decade there was one year when I wasn’t teaching a new spec to at least one class – I was told it’s like trying to convert a diesel train to electric without stopping the journey. I’ve now decided it’s like trying to convert every train to a different type without cancelling journeys or reducing the timetable. So what would I recommend to the government, based on this research, to address physics teacher retention?
Firstly, throw money at the problem – but aim carefully. I’m personally really pleased that the government is acknowledging the concerns raised by the STRB and doing something about this for the profession, and even more so that it’s at least partially funded. They’re looking at how pay could be varied by subject and need, which is something we’ve already seen in physics. I’d argue that a long-term plan for this is needed, and the benefit needs to be spread out rather than just being front-loaded into bursaries. A physics teacher needs to know – as I did, ages back – that I can rely on the extra cash for long enough to get a mortgage. Overall, this needs to be considered carefully, not re-invented annually, and be built on top of broader sector funding reforms that address old buildings and a crumbling SEND component – not to mention the growing problem of the inflexibility of teaching as a career, post-pandemic.
As part of that, we need to be asking better questions. Focussing on physics teachers; it’s almost unbelievable that the DfE can’t say how many physics specialists are teaching in state schools. Specialist is so poorly-defined that deciphering the stats is nearly impossible. Teaching electricity to Year 10 is physics, right, so it needs a physics teacher to count as specialist?
Turns out it’s not that simple. If it’s a Physics GCSE class, then yes. (Let’s not get into whether a D&T teacher who’s a qualified electronics engineer counts, versus a chemistry graduate who did a ten day SKE to access the Physics PGCE programme.) But if it’s a class doing what I still think of as ‘Double Science’, then any science teacher counts as a specialist. We – and by that I mean the DfE – just don’t collect enough information. (If I’m wrong on this, please point me at something more useful.) Teaching within specialism – whether from graduation or acquired by longer-term development – means better outcomes for students and less workload for the teacher. But at the moment we just don’t know how big a problem it is nationally.
Adding to this, I’d like to know why physics teachers leave by asking the ones who are actually leaving. And I mean ALL of them. Give me some money and I’ll run a nationwide anonymous exit survey for every physics specialist leaving a state school. I’ll find out where they’re going and why. I’d hope schools are doing this now, but why on earth isn’t there a standardised set of questions for every departing teacher part of the Ofsted requirement for a school? Don’t add it to the league table, but anonymised to a regional level this would be a valuable tool. Add a threshold for X% of teachers ticking the same box for a particular school which should be a warning sign for SLT and Ofsted. (Heads Round Table, call me.)
Exam board specifications and teaching resources are two sides of the same coin – and they’re both determined by government decisions, interpreted broadly in some cases. That starts with thinking very carefully about what we want the curriculum to do, and most importantly what there is not time for. Gove shoved a load of stuff in the science specification that seemed like a good idea to him and his advisors, and since then the idea of a knowledge-rich curriculum has been taken for granted by many. And it’s not that it’s necessarily bad physics – it’s just that there’s an awful lot. A few years back I wrote a Physics Teacher Guide for Hodder and felt the need to acknowledge in the accompanying SOW how cramped it would be. We need to be honest about what we fit in to the science curriculum and what will need to be left out. (Obviously this is true across all subjects, and that’s before we get into all the other things the media seem to think that schools should be responsible for.)
Creating good resources is harder than it looks, as every early-career teacher has discovered to their cost. The principle behind projects like Oak Academy are noble ones, but as all the publishers would tell you, making good materials takes expertise and time. Neither are free. Exam boards and publishers being entangled – and yes, Pearson, I’m looking at you – means that it’s very easy for specification-matches resources to be produced that then need regular updating and improving, all at a cost. This is an example of the general movement towards rental/subscription rather than ownership – which has benefits, especially for shared digital resources, but it’s not without challenges. I’m listening to Spotify at the moment, but I had to put a playlist together myself because the album I wanted has been ‘updated to a DELUXE Edition’ by the band and I want the original, damnit! (August and Everything After by Counting Crows, if you care.)
Ranting over
I think I’m probably done for now, but the above ideas show that the issues can be addressed, if not solved, in different ways. I’d love to hear suggestions about which are realistic and which are mistaken. My next post – probably at the weekend – will be digging into the survey process itself and what I learned from what didn’t go right.
First things first; the wonderful people at the ASE have now made the published article open-access. You can read the paper via SSR in Depth without logging in, share it with colleagues (including HoDs or SLT) and generally check my working. I would emphasise that I’m a big fan of the ASE, have been a member for some years and encourage colleagues to engage with them. And no, I’m not being paid for that. I’m writing now as an engaged professional, separate from my ASE membership or IOP employment.
Recap
In the first two posts of this mini-series, I explained the context of the research and summarised some of the things we found. In particular, I discussed what can be described as
negative factors – what colleagues said reduced their job satisfaction)
attrition factors – what they said made it more likely they’d choose to move on.
That second one is particularly relevant in physics teaching because we lose so many colleagues from the English state sector. It’s important to note that because of the way data can be collected, what sometimes happens but is hard to track is that teachers move to teaching in independent (fee-paying) schools and/or internationally. I’m interested in the patterns of this migration, so if anyone has data please give me a shout!
This post will examine a third list, the things which colleagues said might be a factor in encouraging them to stay. I’m describing these as retention factors but before I start discussing the stats, it’s important to include a caveat.
Every teacher is different, and every school is different. There are many reasons why teachers leave the profession, and because we tracked intentions rather than actions it will be an imperfect report. Mark is in the process of finishing a separate piece of research where he interviewed those who had made the leap, and that will be a valuable complement to this work. It’s not as if a Head of Department can work down the list of retention factors and add them all to the school policies. And which factors matter most in individual cases may not reflect the order we have here. As I said to a colleague on Twitter, this research – like many other trends we can see in large numbers, such as the reasons girls often choose not to do Physics or the differing perceptions of careers held by parents – gives us the questions to ask, not the definitive answers. (Thanks to Paul Hunt for prompting this response, which I’ve polished slightly here.)
Happy physics teachers are all alike; every unhappy physics teacher is unhappy in their own way.”
(apologies to Tolstoy)
Part of the reason we limited our dataset to colleagues in the first five years was that when we ask similar questions of the most experienced colleagues, their answers are very different for reasons that make perfect sense. In unpublished data from previous work, a large percentage said that teaching out of specialism wasn’t a problem for them. It turned out that this was because most of the respondents fit into one of two categories; many had significant experience and so had gained the skills and knowledge needed for teaching biology and chemistry topics with confidence. Many of the others were in settings where they only taught physics; they could honestly say it wasn’t off-putting for them because they didn’t need to do it! Neither of those things are necessarily applicable to early career colleagues teaching across the curriculum.
Retention factors
Just as with the earlier questions, the teachers were asked about how important possible changes would be in encouraging them to stay in teaching. These factors were defined because we started the survey, but were based on previous studies and unsurprisingly were often possible solutions to the factors proposed in the negative and attrition factors questions.
As before, there was a fairly close match between the factors identified by all respondents and those categorised as ‘at risk’; in fact the order was identical:
financial incentives
increased planning time
reduced marking load
teaching physics only
improved behaviour policy
Beyond the scope of the published article, I spent some time looking at the smaller group who could be described as ‘high risk’. The difference was not huge, but it was interesting; for these respondents, other factors become more important suggesting they’re particularly affected by the workload aspects. I’ve compared the percentages saying it would be a big or medium factor in encouraging retention with the equivalent for all respondents.
financial incentives (93% rather than 92%)
increased planning time (93% rather than 85%)
teaching physics only (89% rather than 75%)
lesson resources (86% rather than 70%)
well-resourced department (82% rather than 70%)
The difference is interesting rather than ground-breaking, but to me it suggests that any solution which does not address their teaching-specific workload is doomed to failure. What I found particularly interesting is that even though they’re at much higher risk, more money wasn’t massively higher. It’s a problem, yes – but it’s not the answer to everything. And although flexible working featured in other lists, by this point they’re beyond worrying about it. Definitely think about how you can offer it, but arguably that’s often a sector issue.
I’ll also point out there was no correlation between the Index of Multiple Deprivations for the school and whether teachers reported concerns about department resourcing.)
How do we solve a problem like retention?
If it was easy, anyone could do it. And it’s amazing how many people, whether they’re celebrated opinion writers in the media or committed teachers on social media, think they can indeed do just that “with this one weird trick…” It turns out that it’s a bit more complicated than that, but this does not mean we shouldn’t try to address it.
I’m going to ignore behaviour improvements, not because I don’t think it’s important but because it’s not a physics teacher problem. We/they are particularly vulnerable to it, and SLT need to understand the challenges of working with hazardous practical tasks in large numbers when students are unable to follow instructions. But let’s be honest; not many schools will have a behaviour issue that only shows up in physics lessons. So what does that leave?
financial incentives
increased planning time
reduced marking load
teaching physics only
lesson resources
department resources
Who can solve a problem like retention?
One problem in organisations of any size is that when things go wrong there are a lot of people to blame. This is made worse when, for completely sensible reasons, those higher up in the organisation may not be able to share all the reasons for decisions that affect us. So the Head of Department gets the blame for the choice of the exam board, even when it’s a decision made at a school or MAT level, because they can’t or won’t share that explanation with their teams.
Something I have up by my desk is a reminder of the different layers in managing UK education and how they inter-relate. It’s an absolute mess and one specific to my day job, so I won’t share it here. Instead, a massively over-simplified version with layers that have decidedly fuzzy edges is below:
So the question now becomes, what changes could we make in the system to improve retention, and critically who can control or influence that? There’s no point in asking the Secretary of State for Education to share their physics teaching resources with an ECT or expecting every new teacher to successfully demand a higher salary because physicists are in short supply. So who makes which decision?
Although the bullet points above look like a wide range, they’re actually closely related. More money could be used to address practically every concern, but there are many reasons why that may not be the first solution we can apply. Separate to that, most of the specific suggestions below are concrete suggestions that reduce the workload of physics teachers, without simply delegating this work to someone else. Many departments will already use some or all of these – others will perhaps not have SLT who realise how much they would help. (I wrote ages ago about SLT needing to know what actual teacher experience is like, and this is never more true than the experiences of physics colleagues teaching out of specialism because ‘it’s all science anyway.’) And addressing some of these will have a knock-on effect – buying in resources for the department will effectively increase available planning time, for example.
In my next post I’m going to work through these approaches and others, but in terms of the layers of influence/control. I’ll be starting with the foundation – the colleagues who work with students.
As I said in yesterday’s post, these musings are my responses, and some behind the scenes explanations, of the article Mark Whalley and I wrote for SSR In Depth. This was based on a survey undertaken as part of my work with the IOP, but was peer-reviewed by colleagues through the ASE. The ideas here are mine rather then being IOP-approved policy, and I hope readers will see that they’re directly based on the data rather than taking a top-down approach.
Context
It’s very easy for teachers – and I’ve been there! – to feel like all schools are like their school. I suspect social media has reduced this somewhat, but it’s done that by encouraging polarisation and assumptions that all schools are variations on a small number of themes, based on those who are the loudest advocates. Getting actual numbers of active specialist teachers is surprisingly difficult, but a good estimate is that of the 30k science teachers in English state schools we’ve got between 4k and 7k physics specialists, rather than the 10k which would be a ‘fair share’. They’re not equally distributed, either – lots of discussion about this at the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Recruitment varies but 600 per year is a reasonable benchmark, and half of those leave (the English state sector) within five years. We’re not in a good place, even compared to the general concerns about teacher supply (such as this from the NFER).
Questions and Answers
Details about the methods are in the paper, and I’ll talk about the challenges in the last post of this series. Put simply, we wrote a survey with a bunch of questions, put it through ethics review and then asked teachers of physics to complete it. Because previous data obtained through my day job had been heavily weighted towards experienced colleagues, we chose to focus on those who were in the first five years of teaching. We further specified England to reduce the confounding factors of different educational systems. More than ninety sets of valid responses were collected – choosing which were valid was interesting but again, you’ll have to wait for the final post – and Mark then did all the hard work of data analysis, looking for patterns and correlations.
We asked respondents about their setting and their career to date. We did not identify schools, going to the extent of asking them to check the deprivation index from an online calculator rather than collecting the postcode ourselves. We chose not to collect any sensitive data which means, for example, we could not analyse any possible effect of age, gender or ethnicity on job satisfaction or attrition.
The survey asked whether colleagues were planning to remain in teaching. It’s really important to acknowledge that this is about intention, and because of when many of the respondents completed it , at the end of the summer term, they may have been at a low point. (As an aside – I’d love to see responses to this question on a monthly basis through the school year to recognise a cycle of peaks and troughs.) Mark has been working on more in-depth questions with former physics teachers, but this approach naturally suffers from the problem that those who respond tend to have the strongest feelings! The headline result: 32% of physics teachers surveyed were seriously considering leaving or actively planning to leave. There was no strong correlation with school characteristics such as size or deprivation score. Many factors were important both for those generally dissatisfied and those planning to leave, but order varied – more of this in a moment.
32% of physics teachers surveyed were seriously considering leaving or actively planning to leave.”
In the survey, respondents were asked to rate different factors in terms of their effect on:
Job satisfaction
Choice to enter teaching
Dissatisfaction
Intention if any to leave teaching
Probability of encouraging them to stay in teaching
What made physics teachers unhappy and what made them consider leaving were, unsurprisingly, overlapping lists. None of these will be a shock, but those of us who remember the ’24 tasks’ list (and a more recent iteration) will recognise that teachers are much more likely to accept what they see as necessary professional tasks than imposed administrivia.
Factors causing dissatisfaction, in order (all respondents)
poor student behaviour/relationships
salary
planning workload
marking workload
administrative tasks
lack of flexible working
school leadership
These are not unique to physics teachers, of course. What was particularly interesting is that some of these factors correlated more strongly with intention to leave than others. Being dissatisfied with planning workload, lack of flexible working and school leadership are clear warning signs that someone might be seriously looking at their options, not just recognising the challenges of the job.
Factors linked to attrition
It’s reasonable to expect that the factors causing colleagues to consider leaving will match the list above. It’s also predictable that when we analyse the importance of these factors, the percentages will go up when we look at those who described themselves as more likely to leave. They’re the high-risk group for attrition, so of course they’re more unhappy! What was really interesting to me is that some are much more significant, and the order changes too.
All respondents
At risk
High risk
salary (70%) student behaviour (60%) planning workload (57%) marking workload (57% school leadership (51%) lack of flexible working (51%)
salary (74%) student behaviour (68%) planning workload (63%) marking workload (59% school leadership (53%) lack of flexible working (51%)
Planning workload (82%) Salary (74%) Marking workload (68%) Student behaviour (68%) Lack of flexible working (68%) School leadership (61%)
The takeaway from comparing the ‘general dissatisfaction’ list with this is a simple one. Teachers grumble about student behaviour, salary and other factors. As a profession we definitely want to address these, but if we want to focus on retaining physics teachers it’s effectively background noise. If we can’t fix everything, what do we choose? The signal we need to look for – the specific issues that seem to be driving people out of the classroom – are the things which are more important to them than the ‘general population’. The planning workload is at the top of that list, followed by a lack of flexible working, marking workload and school leadership.
Coming soon (ish)
Next time I get to write, I’ll be looking at what the responses suggested about addressing – not solving – the issues, particularly for those who were higher risk of attrition. In particular I’ll be sharing what I think about who might be able to make some of these changes, rather than putting all the responsibility in one place.
“Why bother researching something we all know about?” I got asked when we announced a physics teacher retention survey. I guess I could see their point. Everybody knows there aren’t enough physics teachers working in the UK state sector. Everybody knows they leave sooner than we’d like, and everybody knows the reasons for it. So why bother asking the questions when everybody knows the answers we’re going to get?
The obvious response was that it was (and is) my job. It’s on my business cards and everything. Without expert, passionate teachers of physics we don’t get enough expert, passionate physicists. We need a whole load more of those than we currently have. And whether someone’s job title says they’re a physicist or not – many more jobs and courses rely on physics than is obvious to those outside the profession – that knowledge starts with a teacher. So part of my day job is about measuring, supporting and advocating for teacher retention.
The second, more philosophical response is that we don’t stop asking questions because we think we know the answer. That’s not how science works. Either we’ll find something that contradicts what we thought we knew, or we find subtleties and patterns in the data that we didn’t know before. Both of those are good outcomes, and data with a bigger sample is always going to be better than relying on the anecdotes of those physics teachers we’ve happened to meet.
The final, more pragmatic reason is that what “everybody knows” isn’t always the truth. It turns out that what although we are definitely understaffed nationally, the reasons for this aren’t quite as clear-cut as many might think. We wanted to know which factors were most important. Were some teachers more susceptible than others, and how does experience or setting matter? Most importantly, what can we do to address the issues before people leave? Who can affect the different factors?
In our next thrilling episode…
So I’ve set the scene for the research we did. If you want to read ahead, be my guest – the study was published over the weekend in the ASE’s SSR In Depth issue 391. The title I’ve used here is one we considered for publication, because the data shows physics teachers are a warning sign of general sector issues rather than being unique. More posts – and yes, I’m going old-school with my blog rather than doing a podcast or a substack – will hopefully all come out this week:
I’ll give some key points about what we found out, particularly the difference between negative factors and attrition factors
I’ll discuss what possible actions or retention factors the data suggest might be useful, and who is responsible (a hint – we can’t keep blaming Michael Gove)
I’ll confess to the stumbling blocks we had during the survey process
I’ll emphasise here what I’ve said previously on the blog and have pinned on my twitter profile; these are my personal views, not those of my workplace. When I say “I think…” I’m speaking individually, not expressing the policy of the organisation I work for. I’ve also not run them by my co-author, former colleague and friend Mark! Consider them prep room discussions over a coffee rather than carefully thought-out policy recommendations shared while wearing a suit.
Whalley, M. and Horsewell, I (2024) Should I stay or should I go? Exploring the experiences of physics teachers in their first five years. SSR in Depth July 391
In my day job, I spend a fair bit of time trying to get in touch with teachers. I’m also a parent, with kids at three different schools. I’ve come to the conclusion that school email is broken, but that – perhaps surprisingly – it would be relatively easy to fix it. In fact, I think pretty much every school could sort this in a day over the summer, either directly or through the provider of their IT services. As usual, the problem is consistency.
I promise this won’t be a long post, but it’s something that’s been bugging me for ages – and exacerbated by the difficulties contacting teachers by any other route during the pandemic. Normal geeky service will be resumed soon.
There are two main issues with reaching a member of staff at a school. Firstly, you need to know their name. This might mean deciphering your child’s handwriting (and spelling), or finding the right page on the school site. Names change, of course, and so do people. Emailing last year’s head of science when they’ve changed role or moved school is not going to be a good use of anyone’s time.
Secondly, every school chooses a different format for emails. Initial and surname is obvious – but which comes first? Do they have more than one initial? Is there a period in between? There’s enough variation that even if you know their name, you might not get it to them. And a surprising number of schools don’t have useful error messages to help you redirect your important message.
So how could we solve this?
It’s often claimed that businesses treat employees as interchangeable parts. Let’s face it, describing your colleagues as ‘human resources’ doesn’t exactly highlight the individual aspects of the people involved. But there is a place for considering the role before the person filling it, and this is one of those situations. Obviously if I’m going to work with a science department, I’ll need to know names and faces. But for that first contact, what I need is to reach the head of science. It doesn’t matter what their name is.
Alias
Computers don’t speak English (no, not even Alexa). A basic principle of email is that the server can be instructed to accept emails sent to [email protected] and forward them to [email protected]. The user doesn’t have to care about the path. And, critically, the forwarding instructions can be changed on the server by IT quickly, easily and as often as needed. It would certainly be straightforward to do this each term, as staff roles change.
Imagine if every school used the same minimum list of standard aliases, and their own specific context was taken care of in the forwarding rules. In one setting, [email protected] would go to the Head, Ms Tepper. In another, it would go to the Principal, Dr Jemsin. [email protected] might go to a head of the science department, the faculty lead for science and technology, or to the head of biology who’s acting up while the boss is on sick leave.
This could never be a perfect system, but it’s got to make life easier than trying to decipher the responsibility charts on a school site which are often out of date. That can happen behind the scenes. There are considerations about spam, too, but arguably this is better handled centrally than by individual colleagues. The key point is that this only works if the same addresses are used for every school. A possible list:
MAThead – if the school isn’t part of a MAT it goes to the Head.
headteacher
chairofgovernors – if there are no governors, there will be an equivalent panel.
childprotection – a really important one.
businessmanager – redirects to whoever handles the money, whether it’s the Bursar or the finance lead.
headofenglish
headofmaths
headofscience
headofhumanities
headofMFL
headofcreative
headoftechnology
headofyear11 etc
In a primary school, some of these would be the same but others different. Perhaps leadenglish, leadsmaths and leadscience would be useful ones to start with. It would be a smaller list, but probably one which is easier to standardise across settings.
Actions
The important thing is that it shouldn’t be hard to put together a list that covers most school settings, with some careful thought going on for the forwarding. These are about responsibilities, not the job titles or way a school has chosen to organize their subjects. If we want to be able to rely on emails rather than pressing send and hoping, then maybe it’s time to make life a little easier for everyone.
It’s been far too long. It’s been far too busy. And I keep getting told that blogging is over, that all the cool kids communicate on SnapGram or TokTik or something. But the hell with that, I’ve finally got a few minutes to breathe after the weirdest 18 months ever, and this seems like as good a reason as any to get back into writing.
More posts are coming, partially prompted by encouragement on twitter and some just because I need a place to vent. I feel like I’ve been doing too much managing – which like most of us, has meant firefighting and chaos for the last little while – and not enough on teaching. So here goes, once I’ve got my head around the ‘new’ WordPress editor. Coming attractions…
School email and why it’s broken
CPD as a process not an event
Models and Modelling in Science
Why science lights the way rather than being something to follow
Why I hate seeing myself on video
Science since 1901 series – my great grandmother’s textbook
More than three stomachs and no brain – joining a committee.
Why it’s worth considering professional registration
I’m still busy with the day job, and family life always gets more rather than less complicated. But I’m asking you all to prompt and encourage me so I can get this show back on the road…
It feels like a very long time since I blogged… and that’s because it has been a long time. The last year, almost exactly, has been pretty difficult. Over last Autumn and Winter I went through a major depressive episode, family illness, personal illness, accepted a new (exciting, but stressful) role at work… and then something really crappy happened.
I got a call at Cubs that our youngest, then aged 4, had been bitten by the neighbour’s dog. By the time I got home the ambulance crew were already there, making plans to head to Birmingham. When I caught up with them in A&E, he was dosed up on morphine and the consultant asked if I was squeamish before showing me the photos. It was only my previous clinical experience that let me hold it together.
Waiting while he was in surgery for hours the next day was hard, but during the afternoon he started to improve. Family and friends came to the rescue in dozens of ways, large and small. Both workplaces told us to forget everything except our child and each other. Nurses found us food and coffee and the Ronald McDonald House around the corner found us a room with a shower long after midnight.
A few days later and he was doing really well, wandering along the ward in between doses of painkillers and raiding the chocolate I’d brought in for his Mum. We took him home less than a week after he’d arrived, with boxes of fresh dressings and a balloon. Pretty much every member of staff went out of their way at some point, and we saw them doing the same thing for long shifts with every child on that ward, helping every tired and lonely parent. They were amazing, and we wanted to do something to say thank you.
So this is why I’m writing; as those of you who follow me on twitter will know, I’ve been training for a running event. In just under three weeks I’ll be doing the Great Birmingham Run, a half-marathon, in aid of the Birmingham Children’s Hospital Charity. The kids are running various smaller events on the day, and probably laughing at my face as I struggle to the finish line. But what would really help is if some of you might like to sponsor us.
Thank you for reading, and to everyone who at various points in the last year have offered moral or practical support during tough times.
TL, DR: I’ve been blogging for years, and although it’s led to many great freelance opportunities I’ve never asked my readers to send cash my way. (Admittedly, I have linked to fundraising for Humanists UK, MIND and a few other charities.) This is, I hope, the last time I will be asking that if anything I’ve blogged, tweeted or otherwise shared has been useful, that you could say thank you with cash.
Now, the advert and links and so on are at the end of this post. But first I wanted to write a little about the process, which arguably is more relevant for most teachers.
Commissioning
When I was asked to write this, I was given a very specific brief. The format for a revision guide is very structured, which can be both helpful and frustrating. It’s helpful because you have a clear place to start, with lots of small parts that will in time come together to form sections and chapters. It’s frustrating because, inevitably, that structure doesn’t fit every subject perfectly but it must be followed for consistency. I now know better which questions to ask, how much to write before getting some comments and why that format is necessary to avoid complications at the later stages. And I know how to get asked; be recommended by a colleague who has shown he or she is confident to work with you. Thanks to Carol Davenport aka @drdav for being that colleague for me.
Writing
Every teacher has written summaries of particular topics. We know that some are easier than others. One challenge I had was trying to focus on a summary, without including too much teaching. Using worked examples, for instance – is that useful for recall? To illustrate a definition? And how do you explain the less typical but still important cases, without getting sidetracked?
Another complication was the need to follow the structure of the matching textbook, which had been written – as is almost always the case right now – to follow the specification. Now, honestly, I have my doubts about this approach. I’d love to be involved in an exam-board-agnostic project, with a textbook matched to practice books (SLOP anyone?) and, importantly, a teachers’ guide which delves into the pedagogy specific to each aspect. In a dream world. this would be a print-on-demand project where you would add a chapter on your exact specification, with checklist and paper breakdown, to the subject-led approach. But enough of utopia. (Unless you want me to work on it, in which case email me.)
I wrote one chapter at a time, broken down into headings with diagrams specified as I went. These went to the editor, who sent versions back with queries or suggested revisions. It was not unusual to be writing one chapter – each took about a week of evenings spent slaving over a hot laptop – while revising another. And then there were the questions and answers, plus exam-style questions and accompanying markschemes.
Editing and Proofs
This was the stage that surprised me, even having contributed to a book before. There are so many people who need to see, comment and suggest changes. Some were simple corrections; we all make spelling mistakes or cut and paste errors while rephrasing paragraphs. Some picked up on ambiguous wording, or suggested alternate examples. Sometimes I followed the suggestions, and sometimes the original text was adjusted in a different way. The diagrams and photos each needed to be checked, sometimes amended or redrawn. At one point I was receiving editorial suggestions from three different people about different versions of the same text, at the same time as trying to trim it down for length. The consolation was getting to see my words in print, as the proofs came out on paper each time to scribble on.
Publication
After the work being signed off in July it’s finally published, ready for the year 11 students who will be sitting their exams this coming summer. My author copies arrived yesterday, and apart from the one I’ve promised to my Mum – as pointed out on Twitter, I’m going to have to send her a very strong fridge magnet – I’m going to offer them to parents in the Home Ed facebook groups, for a donation to charity. If you’re teaching the Edexcel IGCSE course, have a look below for some links.
Reflection
I have no intention of working out my hourly rate. Like anything in educational publishing, being an author is not a rational decision in terms of money earned. But I’m still glad I did it, and once I’ve completed my masters course I’d be happy to look at similar projects (HINT). Plus, well, a book. With my name on it. Apart from anything else, I’ve learned to be a lot more patient with published books and their authors. With so many steps, and so many people involved, some mistakes are inevitable. And they’re even more frustrating for the author than for the reader, I promise! I understand the limitations, either practical ones or because of industry norms, better than I did. And there are several areas of physics I now know better than ever, because I’ve had to think of every way an explanation could be misunderstood, and do better. For that reason, I’d recommend any experienced teacher tries writing for publication, because it prompts us to give the best we can, with the time to think it through that is rarely possible in a classroom.
Following up yesterday’s reflective post, my typed up bullet points of the afternoon sessions. As before, my thanks to the organisers and presenters and a promise that I’ll update these posts with links to the actual presentations in a week or so.
Do They Really Get It session by Niki Kaiser (@chemDrK)
Students gave correct answers by imitation, not based on deep understanding, as shown by discussions of ions in a solution vs electrons in a wire; I wonder if the demo showing movement of coloured ions during ‘slow’ electrolysis would help?
Threshold concepts guide the teacher when choosing what to highlight, what to emphasize in lessons. There should be no going back from the lightbulb moment. If so, why do we need to constantly return to these misconceptions where students rely on folk physics despite explicit refutation work with us?
It is worth making explicit to students that these are challenging (and often abstract) concepts, and so time to understand them is both normal and expected. In Physics we make this clear with quantum work but perhaps it should be a broader principle.
#rEDRugby my thoughts on @chemDrK‘s “these concepts are hard”: we need to share that with kids so they don’t think it’s them. They’re using brains evolved for arguing about fruit for a totally different task.
Teachers will do a lot of this already, but we need to be more deliberate in our practice, both for our students and for our own reflection. This is how we improve, and is particularly important for us as experts to put ourselves in the position of novices. This is part of what we refer to as PCK.
“Retrace the journey back to innocence…” a quote from Glynis Cousins in a 2006 paper (this one?) which is about better understanding where our students are coming from. I would use the word ‘ignorance’, but like ‘naive’ there are many value judgments associated with it!
It’s not properly learned unless students can still do it when they weren;t expecting to need to.
From @chemDrK: “not learned unless they know it when not waiting for it to be tested”
Me to @DSGhataura : “*Nobody* expects the Chemical Inquisition!”#rEDRugby
The bar-model is an algebraic way of thinking about a situation, without using algebra explicitly. This means it is compatible with better/quicker approaches, rather than being a way around them like the formula triangle.
Paraphrasing @BenRogersEdu: a formula triangle is an alternative to algebra, the bar model is a step towards it. Compatible with development ie learning. #rEDRugby
Uses principles from CLT; less working memory is needed for the maths so more is available for the physics.
Suggests (emphasizes this is speculative) that visual rather than verbal information is a way to expand working memory. This is also an example of dial coding and presumably one of the strengths.
Compare approaches by using different methods with two halves of a class. Easiest way is to rank them using data, then ‘odd number positions’ use one approach to contrast with ‘even number positions’ for the other. Even if the value of the measurement used for the ranking is debatable, this should give two groups each with a good spread of ability/achievement.
Useful approach for accumulated change and conservation questions; could be difficulties for those questions where the maths makes it look like a specific relationship, such as V = E/Q, as this reinforces a unit approach rather than ratio.
A Sankey diagram, although a pain to draw, effectively uses the bar method. The width of each arrow is the length of the bar, and they are conserved.
Some questions are harder than others and the links may not be obvious to students, even if they are to us. Be explicit about modelling new ‘types’ (and discussing similarity to established methods). This sounds like a use, deliberate or otherwise, of the GRR model from Fisher and Frey.
— oliver caviglioli (@olivercavigliol) June 10, 2018
Reconstructing meaning is how we build understanding. Although this process is by necessity individual, it can be more or less efficient.
The old idea of remembering seven things at once is looking shaky; four is a much better guideline. If one of those things or ‘elements’ is a group, however, it represents a larger number of things. Think of this as nested information, which is available if relevant.
We need to design our lessons and materials to reduce unproductive use of the limited capacity of the brain.
Two approaches are the Prototype (Rosch) and Sets (Aristotle). Suspicion that different disciplines lean more towards different ends of this spectrum. Type specimens in science are an interesting example. My standard example is of different Makaton signs for ‘bird’ and ‘duck’ and the confusion that follows. Links to discussion on twitter recently with @chemdrK about how we need to encourage students to see the difference between descriptions and definitions (tags and categories) when, for example, talking about particles.
Facts can be arranged in different ways including random (disorganised), list, network (connections) and hierarchical. By providing at least some of this structure, from an expert POV, we save students time and effort so recall (and fluency) is much more efficient. Statistic of 20% vs 70% recall quoted. Need to find the source of this and look into creating a demonstration using science vocab for workshops.
The periodic table is organised data, and so the structure is meaningful as well as the elements themselves. Alphabetical order, or the infamous song, are much less useful.
Learning as a Generative Activity, 2015 is recommended but expensive at ~£70.
Boundary conditions are a really important idea; not what works in education, but what works better, for which students, in which subjects, under X conditions. This should be a natural fit for science teachers who are (or should be) used to explaining the limitations of a particular model. This is where evidence from larger scale studies can inform teacher judgment about the ‘best’ approach in their setting and context.
Bottom-up and top-down approaches then become two ends of a spectrum, with the appropriate technique chosen to suit a particular situation and subject. To helpfully use the good features of a constructionist approach we must set clear boundaries and outcomes; my thought is that for a=F/m we give students the method and then ask them to collect and analyse data, which is very different to expecting them to discover Newton’s Laws unassisted. It might, of course, not feel different to them – they have the motivation of curiosity, which can be harnessed, but it would be irresponsible to give them free rein. From a climber’s perspective, we are spotting and belaying, not hoisting them up the cliff.
Missed Opportunities And My Jobs List
As you might expect, there were several sessions I would have loved to attend. In my fairly limited experience this is a problem with most conferences. In particular I was very disappointed not to have the chance to hear the SLOP talk from @rosalindphys, but the queue was out of the door. The presentation is already online but I haven’t read it yet, because then I knew I’d never get my own debrief done. This applies to several other sessions too, but it was only sensible to aim for sessions which could affect my own practice, which is as a teacher-educator/supporter these days rather than a ‘real’ teacher.
After some tweeted comments, I’m reproducing my jobs list. This has already been extracted from my session notes and added to my diary for the coming weeks, but apparently it may be of interest. In case you’re not interested, my customary appeal for feedback. Please let me know what if any of this was useful for you, and how it compares with your own take-away ideas from the sessions. And if I didn’t catch up with you during the day, hopefully that will happen another time.
Talk to Dom about CPhys course accreditation
use references list to audit blended learning prototype module
add KS3 circuits example showing intrinsic/germane/extraneous load to workshop
review SOLO approach and make notes on links to facts/structured facts part of CLT
check with Pritesh if subject associations have been (or could be) involved with booklet development
read Kristy’s piece for RSC about doing your first piece of ed research
check references for advice on coding conversations/feedback for MRes project
search literature for similar approach (difficulty points scores) for physics equation solving
share idea re reports: a gap in comments may itself be an implicit comment
check an alert is set with EEF for science-specific results
use Robin’s presentation links to review roles for a research-informed school – might be faster to use Niki’s Research Lead presentation
build retrieval practice exercise for a physics topic that is staged, and gives bonus points for recall of ‘earlier’ concepts
TILE livestream from Dundee Uni; sign-up form?
follow Damian Benny
share ionic movement prac with Niki
add Cousin, 2006 to reading list
write examples of singapore bar model approach for physics contexts – forces?
pre-order Understanding How We Learn
use Oliver’s links as a way to describe periodic table organisation – blog post?
find correct reference from Oliver’s talk, AGHE et all 1969 about self-generated vs imposed schema changing recall percentages
You’ll have to check in with me in a month to see how many of these have actually been done…
Teaching Science 
